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Mehmet Ali Agca was at it again. "I am Jesus Christ," bellowed the man who shot Pope John Paul II. "All the world will be destroyed." The now familiar outburst came on March 22, the final day of the marathon "Bulgarian connection" trial in Rome. The prosecution's aim: to prove that the Turkish gunman, who was convicted in 1981 of gravely wounding the Pope on May 13 of that year in St. Peter's Square, was working for Bulgarian agents and, by implication, the Soviet Union. The ten-month trial of Agca's alleged accomplices--and of Agca himself...
After 6 1/2 days of deliberation, the jury last week delivered its verdict. To the surprise of no one, the eight-member panel acquitted all three Bulgarian defendants on the technical grounds of insufficient evidence, following a formal recommendation made by Marini last month. Three of the Turkish defendants were acquitted on the same technicality. But one of them, Omer Bagci, was convicted of smuggling into Italy the Browning 9-mm semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting and was sentenced to three years in prison. Agca was also found guilty as charged and given an additional year in jail...
Half of the defendants were absent throughout the trial. The sole Bulgarian in court was Sergei Antonov, 37, the bespectacled deputy chief of Rome's Balkan Air office, who has been in Italian custody since 1982 and allegedly helped plan the plot. His presumed accomplices, Todor Aivazov, 43, and Zhelyo Vassilev, 44, Bulgarian embassy officials in Rome at the time of the shooting, were safely home in Sofia. Both left Italy shortly before Antonov's arrest as part of what Bulgarian officials called a normal embassy rotation. Two of the four Turkish defendants were also missing. Oral Celik...
...help him shoot the Pope. ( Rather, they may have been supporting one of the jewelry-store robberies or other holdups to which he admits. Says Claire Sterling, author of an influential book, The Time of the Assassins, which argues that there was indeed a plot: "I believe in the Bulgarian connection, but frankly, I couldn't have voted to convict those defendants on that evidence...
...began with a bang and seems likely to end with a whimper. The bang: the gunshots fired at Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981, by Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca. The whimper: Italian Prosecutor Antonio Marini's recommendation last week that three Bulgarian defendants charged with complicity in the attack be acquitted on the technical ground of "insufficient evidence." If the court heeds Marini's advice when it hands down its verdict this month, the result will be a stunning blow to the * "Bulgarian Connection" theory, which maintained that Bulgarian intelligence services organized the papal attack...